


Secret Superwoman fic prompt responses and minifics.

by TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel



Series: Secret Superwoman [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: F/M, prompts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:16:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1451764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel/pseuds/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>See above.</p><p>Prompts include: DC Comics' reaction to Superwoman, Darcy's relationship with the Hulk, Thor was the first to find out, Darcy's parents find out about Superwoman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. DC Comics' reaction to Superwoman

**Author's Note:**

> I have nothing else to do tonight, so I'm answering some prompts.

**Prompt: I'd love to see DC's reactions to her. [From MarcusRowland]**

Darcy stared at Tony in disbelief. Beside her Steve was valiantly trying to hide a smile, while the other Avengers weren’t even making that much effort.

“DC Comics want to put out a comic. About me,” she said faintly. Next to her Steve had given up on trying to hide his smile, and was openly grinning.

“According to the letter they sent to the Avengers via Stark Industries, yeah,” Tony confirmed. “And I’m only a little bit jealous, by the way.”

“They want to create a _comic book_ about me,” Darcy insisted. “And release _action figures_.”

“I’d buy an action figure,” Steve said thoughtfully. “Seems only fair, since you’ve got those Captain America ones.”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Darcy told him, while Clint sniggered loudly. She turned back to Tony. “I don’t know if I want a comic book! I’ve seen the Captain America comic books, and no one ever pays attention to accuracy! And DC sometimes treats female characters in a disrespectful way! Look what they did to Harley Quinn’s outfit!”

Tony shrugged.

“Well, it’s up to you. Either way, you need to come up with a response.”

“Ugh!” Darcy made a face. She took a deep breath.

“Okay, so I admit that it would be kind of cool to have a comic book and action figures, but on the other hand, I keep thinking of all the ways this could go horribly wrong. I mean, I don’t want to end up the next Power Girl, okay.”

“What’s wrong with Power Girl?” asked Clint. Natasha gave him a look. “I withdraw my question.”

“Maybe you should talk to a representative about it,” Bruce suggested. “Ask them about what their goals are for the project and how much input you’d have, whether you’d have any power to veto, that sort of thing.”

“That’s actually helpful,” said Darcy. “Thanks, Bruce.”  
 


	2. Darcy's relationship with the Hulk

**Prompt: Training with Thor and/or the Hulk maybe? Bruce & Darcy and Hulk & Darcy friendship - she's not breakable the way most of the world is, and she has an idea of what it's like going through a world made of cardboard. [From morning_dew]**

Some people are scared shitless of Hulk, Darcy knows.

She understands their fear: most human beings are fairly fragile, physically speaking, and Hulk is a giant green ball of homicidal rage, unstoppable and unreasoning. It makes perfect sense for the average person to be scared of him. Even Natasha, who is the closest thing to a badass female action hero Darcy has ever seen in real life, still has some residual fear of Hulk, despite having worked with him for ages.

Darcy, on the other hand, is pretty near invulnerable, and after growing up as the weird kid in her class at school has a certain sympathy for feelings of boundless rage and the desire to smash, like, everything. Those days are long-gone, sure, and she always had more control than Hulk (obviously), but she still remembers what it feels like to feel powerless, to want to take back control from those who hurt her, despite knowing the horrific consequences of ever losing her temper.

She broke a kid’s nose, once. If she’d had any less control, she would have killed him. She never forgot that particular lesson.

Anyway, Darcy has a certain amount of understanding for Hulk, and she can take anything he dishes out, even at his most uncontrollable, so at this point the two of them have a certain understanding.

Hulk likes people who aren’t afraid of him and aren’t trying to hurt him, it turns out, and both he and Darcy have a shared understanding of how important it is to be careful, and how hard it is living through a world that might as well be made of cardboard for how sturdy it is compared to the two of them. Darcy spent her entire childhood breaking things – pulling off doorknobs, crushing drinking glasses by accidentally gripping too hard, crashing through a wall because she tripped while she was running through the house – and while she’s pretty fabulous at controlling her strength these days, the old, deep fear of breaking the breakable is still there. Hulk, when he isn’t acting like a giant rage monster, is so terribly, achingly careful that sometimes it almost breaks Darcy’s heart.

So Darcy talks to him, and hangs around with him, and offers him the occasional hug, which Hulk accepts with startled, beaming shyness. One time she even painted his nails for him, which left Bruce seriously confused once he’d changed back because hello, his nails were not magenta, last time he checked. (Darcy didn’t tell him about her and Hulk’s nail-painting session. Maybe it was mean, but Bruce’s bewildered face as he examined his magenta nails was hilarious.) 

Darcy gets along with Bruce, as well, for pretty similar reasons – Bruce is just as afraid of breaking things (read: people) as Hulk is, maybe even more so, and Darcy is the closest thing to unbreakable that exists. So Bruce is relatively relaxed in her presence, losing some of that anxious burden that he carries with him everywhere.

And if Bruce gets angry? Well, Darcy’s not afraid of that. She knows what it’s like to be angry, and dangerous, and scared of being both.


	3. Thor was the first to find out

**Prompt: Well, it might be interesting to have some conversations with the other alien on the team. Maybe he or other Aesir know of her birth people (Please say she's not a Skrull).[From morning_dew]**

It was Thor who found out first.

Darcy was usually pretty careful about the whole alien superpowers thing, but it had been a long day, and when she dropped her favourite pen and it rolled under the refrigerator, well, that was just one more thing and Darcy had _had_ it with today. She looked around quickly to make sure that Jane wasn’t around, and then crouched down to lift up the edge of the refrigerator and retrieve her pen. Pen retrieved, Darcy put the refrigerator down again, stood up, and turned around, ready to grab her cup of coffee and casually leave the kitchen.

Except that Thor was standing in the doorway, and kind of giving her a knowing look.

“Uh,” said Darcy. “Can we just, like, pretend that didn’t happen? Where’s Jane?”

“She is deep in her research,” said Thor, still with the knowing look. “I doubt she will hear us. Perhaps,” he added, after a short pause, during which Darcy just stood there awkwardly, “you wish to explain?”

Darcy swallowed, because no she didn’t, not really, but this was Thor, resident alien, and his expression was kind enough.

“Okay. Here’s the thing. I’m kind of… not from around here.” Deep breath. “As in, I’m originally from another world.”

“I see,” said Thor, as though she’d said something completely ordinary. “And you have strength beyond that of ordinary mortals, I take it.”

Darcy had to laugh.

“Dude, I have no idea how strong I even am,” she said. “I’ve never had the chance to find out. Everything is so damn _fragile_.”

Thor gave her an conspirational grin.

“This I know well,” he agreed. “Do not tell Tony, but last week I broke one of those small tables which decorate the common living area. I prevailed upon JARVIS to have it replaced without informing him.”

Darcy snorted.

“Tell me,” said Thor curiously, “how did you come to be on this world?”

So Darcy ended up telling him the whole story, of landing on Earth as a little kid and eventually being adopted, of growing up her whole life hiding who she was.

“When I was little, I used to tell people that when I grew up I wanted to be Superman,” she told Thor. “He’s this fictional superhero who has the same powers that I do, and he’s, well, heroic. Truth, justice, and the American way was sort of his catchphrase, although they put less emphasis on the American thing now, I think to appeal to the international markets more. Or maybe they just think an alien representing one nation alone is a bit gauche. Anyway, I used to think that when I grew up, I could just put on a costume and go out and help people.”

“Why don’t you, if that is what you wish?” Thor asked.

Darcy stared at him.

“What?”

“Is that not what the Avengers do?” Thor pointed out.

“Yeah, but….” Darcy said slowly. There was a long silence as she thought about it. “You really think I could? You think it’s that easy?”

“I do not see why not,” said Thor.

* * *

Getting hold of a female Superman costume actually wasn’t as hard as Darcy thought it might be. There was a person on Etsy who made female genderswapped comic-book costumes, so Darcy just sent them her measurements, and a few weeks later her costume arrived in the mail. Within the week, Darcy made her first public appearance, and ended up rescuing Captain America from beneath a pile of rubble. The next time that Darcy saw Thor, he winked at her.

She grinned, and winked back. It was their little secret.


	4. Darcy's parents find out about Superwoman

**After reading this, I can't help but wonder how her parents might react to the fact that she DID become Super(wo)man, though. [From Mireille_Hargreaves]**

Evangeline and David find out about Superwoman the same way that the rest of the country does: by opening a newspaper and seeing a photograph of her on the third page. It’s Evangeline who reads the paper first, who finds herself staring at someone in a female Superman outfit with flowing dark hair pulling rubble off Captain America, and sits there for a moment or two just absorbing what she’d seeing. Then:

“David,” Evangeline says faintly, “come look at this photo and tell me if you see what I see.”

So David walks over to peer over Evangeline’s shoulder, and then goes tense as he sees what Evangeline does.

“That looks,” he says finally, “remarkably like our daughter in a Superman costume.”

“That’s what I thought.”

They look at each other, and back at the newspaper.

There have always been problems raising an alien child with superpowers: the number of things that were broken in their house was one, and the way that Darcy never seemed to fit in as a child was another. But Darcy had grown up into a lovely young woman with the kind of life her parents had wanted for her, even if they’re not exactly sure what it is she _does_. Neither of them expected to find that Darcy has joined New York’s roster of superheroes.

But then Evangeline thinks of how obsessed Darcy was with Superman as a child, and how she used to insist that one day she would grow up to be Superman, and wonders if all this time, Darcy was just waiting for the right opportunity.

“You know, she always said she was going to be Superman when she grew up,” David says with a small, disbelieving laugh, unknowingly echoing Evangeline’s thoughts. “But I always thought that was a phase.”

“I am going to kill her,” Evangeline says calmly, the shock beginning to wear off, “I talked to her just _last night_ , she made no mention of this to me–”

“Honey, stop,” David says firmly. “You are got going to start out by treating Darcy as a naughty child who’s done something wrong.”

“But –”

“Evangeline, _think_ about it,” he says patiently. So Evangeline does, even though her instinctive reaction is to want to call Darcy  and ask her what the hell she thinks she’s doing.

Darcy is an adult, she reminds herself, fully capable of making her own decisions. That doesn’t make it any easier to understand why she’s decided to become a superhero, not when Evangeline had been so proud of her for managing to achieve a normal life –

Evangeline stops that thought, rewinds it, and really _looks_ at it. Because Darcy isn’t normal, she never has been. Evangeline thinks back to the terrifically bright, peculiar little girl she raised, the little girl who always used to complain sadly about how she didn’t fit in, and why couldn’t people accept her for the way she was, and why did she always have to hide…

…and thinks that maybe, she understands a little, after all.

“I’m still going to kill her for not telling me,” Evangeline tells David, because this is the sort of information a mother shouldn’t have to find out by reading a newspaper. “But if this is really what she wants to do with her life, then I won’t say anything.”

“Good,” says David. “Darling, this is just as much of a shock to me as it is to you, but on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of stunt Darcy would pull, don’t  you think? And if it makes her happier –”

Evangeline thinks of how unhappy Darcy was the last time she visited, and how much happier she sounds when she calls since she took that job in New York, the assistant job that she’s always so vague about.

“If it makes her happier, I can only be glad,” she says. “Well. And worried for her, of course, with the things those Avengers face, but I want to see our little girl happy.”

“Me too,” says David, and drops a kiss on her hair. “Now, go ring that girl and find out what on Earth is going on.”

* * *

It turns out that Darcy’s mysterious job is mysterious because it’s classified. While Evangeline is still trying to deal with that idea – how on Earth did Darcy go from interning for this Dr Foster woman to working with her on a classified project when Darcy doesn’t even have a science degree? – Darcy admits that her job has brought her into contact with some of the Avengers, and Thor – the purported Norse god – is actually a friend of hers.

“The Superwoman thing was kind of his idea, actually,” Darcy says, while Evangeline is stunned speechless on the other end of the phone. “We were having this bonding session over how easy it is to break like, everything on Earth, and I was telling him about how I’d like to use my powers to help people, and he was all, ‘well why don’t you?’ And I figured he was right, so hey presto! One costume later and I was Superwoman.”

“I… see,” says Evangeline. Darcy rambles on for a while about how cool it is to be a superhero, and how nice it is to be able to do stuff like fly in front of everybody, and does Evangeline know that Darcy’s a hit on tumblr? She has fans and everything. By the time that Darcy hangs up, Evangeline just wants to sit for a while and process everything.

Some phone calls are easier, especially once Evangeline gets used to conversational openers like “Today I punched a giant mutant squid and it like _exploded_ everywhere, I will never feel clean again,” and “Tony Stark hasn’t rung you or anything, has he? Because he said something about asking you for childhood stories, which _no._ Just no.”

David seems to deal with it a little better, but then he always did: he’s always been calmer and more thoughtful than Evangeline, and sometimes Evangeline has mused that there couldn’t possibly be a better candidate for raising such an unpredictable little girl.

Sometimes, though, even he’s flummoxed by the things Darcy says and does.

“So,” says Darcy, where she’s standing in the doorway with six feet of blonde and bashful behind her, “this is Steve, my boyfriend, who I said was coming to visit with me, so I don’t know why you’re both looking so shocked.”

“ _Captain America_ ,” says David weakly.

Evangeline opens her mouth to say something, _anything_ appropriate, but what comes out instead is, “She used to dress up like you.”

Darcy facepalms.

“I know,” says Captain America politely. “I’ve seen a photo. She was a cute kid,” he adds. “Can we come in?”

“Oh, of course,” says David, looking embarrassed. He and Evangeline back away from the door to let Darcy and – dear god, her _boyfriend_ – inside.

“Darcy, sweetheart, you never told me that you were dating Captain America,” says Evangeline.

“I thought you knew!” Darcy protests. “Everyone knew! The internet is a thing!”

“The gossip websites do talk about us a lot,” Captain America says thoughtfully.

“Exactly!” Darcy says triumphantly, like she’s won some sort of argument Evangeline didn’t know that they were having.

Evangeline suddenly realises how rude they’re being, and turns to Captai – _Steve_ , she mentally corrects herself.

“I’m so sorry, normally we’re much politer than this. We’re just – surprised.”

Steve grins, and oh my, Evangeline can definitely understand what Darcy sees in him.

“That’s okay. I’m used to it.”

Evangeline smiles back graciously and nods, and tries to pretend she isn’t still rather stunned.

One day her daughter is going to stop surprising her, but today isn’t that day, it seems.


End file.
